The drive from Nairobi to our camp in the Maasai Mara was about nine hours. We left Mombasa at 4 in the morning, took a one hour flight to Nairobi, and then set out in the largest garbage-truck-like buses the world has ever seen. The windows were wide and un-closeable for the best possible viewing of the savanna animals. For the ride out there, they served as wind tunnels and opportunities to call out to people as we passed by.

If one were to drive the distance from Nairobi to the Maasai Mara in the United States, I would be surprised if it took you more than 4 hours. We spent a great deal of time stuggling over rugged roads, stopping, and winding about. We saw some ostrich and topi and a carcass of a zebra that lay half-eaten by the side of the road. No one ever moves things or tidies on the African savanna. It turns out that nature does a pretty good job of that herself, providing you give her generous enough a time scale.

The sun began to set and there were giraffes in the distance, silhouetted against the purple sky. One fellow in our group, Jake, had always dreamed of coming to Africa and taking the perfect picture of a giraffe silouetted against the sunset. He wasn't quite sure if it would actually happen, if Africa actually looked like what all the movies had always advertised. But the Maasai Mara does not disappoint. It is not flat like many grasslands, it has rolling hills and plateaus much like southern and western Colorado. The large animals in the movies are ubiquitous. The classic picture of Africa with the animals against the sun is somewhat easily obtained as there are many ridges and on each a motley gathering of animals waits, patiently grazing until the sun begins to set.

Almost as soon as Jake got his photograph, we saw the rains come down in Africa. And down and down they came, sweeping across the grasslands as cornflower curtain, growing deeply purple-grey as evening turned into night, thick, intense rain, come to drown us in Life, come to make us clean.

We left our things in our tents, chosen haphazardly without knowledge of where any tent stood with respect to the rest of camp. Once settled, we dashed through the swimming drops to a covered wooden structure, sturdily made with chicken wire screens and small bright rustic lanterns of warm yellow light. They'd prepared us dinner, it was leek soup. It was thick and steaming and they ladled it into our simple round bowls as often as we held them out. That's all we had for dinner that night, really, after more than 18 hours of travel, but that's all we needed. I believed that I had never eaten such a delicious meal and feared that I might never eat such a meal again. Leek soup. I got the recipe from the cook, it's like any recipe you might find in a cook book in America, only the Africans use water and the Americans use milk. In America there is an abundance of milk. In subsaharan Africa, there is an abundance of water. What separates this water from water anywhere else in the world? I suppose it is the singular quality that it gives African leek soup, I should say.
We fell asleep to the sound of the laughter of Americans (one of the most lovely sounds in the world, in my opinion) and one of the other most lovely sounds in the world, the African rain.

Eck! Leeks!
Leeks aren't fit for human consuption. >.<
» SilverWolf on 2005-12-03 04:30:04

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